Every day people use their prepaid cards to pay for various goods, their smartphone apps for public transport tickets, and their bonus cards for supermarkets – all the while not realizing that by doing so, they’re giving away their privacy. Most of these payment systems disclose in detail what and when users buy, consume or which routes they’re taking. Thankfully, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now developed a new, secure and anonymous payment system that doesn’t leave a trace.
If you’re wondering how and why our everyday payment systems can reveal so much about our activities, here is why: to protect us. Since manipulation of accounts by hackers and other criminals would happen regularly with no security measures applied, customer data and account balances of payment and bonus systems are administrated with the help of a central database. So, whenever you pay for something, your identity is revealed as well as the details of your transaction, which all get transmitted to the central database. This process creates a data trace that can easily be misused by the provider or third parties.
To improve the payment systems we all use, the KIT team has developed a black-box accumulation plus (BBA+) protocol that transfers all data guaranteeing user confidentiality with its cryptographic method. Furthermore, BBA+ also offers security guarantees for the operators as it’s mathematically constructed in a way that the user identity is revealed as soon as someone attempts to pay with a manipulated account.
Source:
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie via ScienceDaily (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171025122416.htm)
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